THE MORE OPEN YOU ARE, THE MORE YOU SEE

"The artist has a sharper eye. He sees what you do not see. He has a more fertile imagination and captures in the mirror of his imagination things that escape your notice. He sees more; he sees deeper; he sees better; he sees things in relationship to each other." These words by Abraham Kuyper make us wonder if creative people have an edge over other people in terms of how they see the world. Research seems to indicate that they do, that they are able to see things that others can't.

According to French writer Anais Nin, "we don't see things as they are; we see things as we are", supporting the view that how we see the world is determined to some extent by our personality. There is some evidence that suggests that people who are adventurous and open to new experiences have better visual awareness and can take in more visual information than other people and combine it in unique ways. Openness to experience is one of the five traits often used to describe personality. It is characterised by curiosity, creativity and an interest in exploring new things. Open people tend to do well at tasks that test our ability to come up with creative ideas, such as imagining innovative new uses for everyday objects.

Most people's brains can only process one image at a time. When faced with two different images most people's eyes switch back and forth to focus on one or the other. With open-minded people the brain merges the two images into a single unified image. In one study, a red patch was presented to one eye and a green patch to the other. While most people saw the separate patches alternating, the brains of particularly open-minded people combined them into a single red and green patch, which was interpreted as a form of creative thinking. The researcher summed it up by expressing that "when you present open people with the binocular rivalry dilemma, their brains are able to flexibly engage with less conventional solutions," leading her to conclude that they have different visual experiences to the average individual. People with a high degree of openness tend to be more creative and innovative because they actually perceive the world differently.

A well-known experiment in the field of psychology studied inattentional blindness, or, to put it more simply, missing things that others see. People experience this when they are so focused on one thing that they completely fail to see something else right before their eyes. In this experiment the participants are required to watch a video of people throwing a ball to one another, and to track the total number of passes between the players. During the video, a person in a gorilla costume wanders in, beats his chest and wanders off. About half the people failed to spot the gorilla. One explanation is that inattentional blindness is linked to personality, and that the gorilla was more likely to be seen by creative people. More visual information seems to break through into the conscious perception of people high in openness, so that they see things that others miss. To watch this experiment click here.

Seeing is believing. Or is it? Psychologists argue that while this may be partly true, our sight is more complicated than that. What we perceive in any given moment is not only determined by sensory visual input, but by our personal physical abilities, energy levels, feelings, social identities, and personalities. We believe that we experience the world as it objectively is, but things that seem true and universal are often just our own unique experience of the world. Everyone has their own view of the world, and we make judgements and decisions based on things as we perceive them.

It seems, judging from many studies, that the more open you are, the more you see. Creative people don't just bring a different perspective to things, they genuinely see and process the world differently to the average individual. They have fundamentally different visual experiences, extending right down to basic visual perception. The idea that some people see more possibilities than others is central to the concept of creativity. This curiosity to examine things from all angles may lead people high in openness to see more, discover complex possibilities in the familiar environment and combine the visual information in unique ways. As Pablo Picasso expressed it: "Others have seen what is and asked why. I have seen what could be and asked why not."